Big drama show. Very serious business.
September 15, 2017 3:13 AM   Subscribe

For fans of spectacle, the most anticipated fight of the year was Mayweather-McGregor (previously). For fans of boxing, it happens this Saturday.

Gennady "GGG" Golovkin (37-0, 33 by stoppage, the highest knockout percentage the middleweight division has ever seen) has a ready smile and a unique way with English and Spanish. Chin push-ups and Julio Cesar Chavez, Sr. fight tapes, along with his punching power, have made him the most avoided man in the sport.

Saúl "Canelo" Álvarez (49-1-1, 34 by stoppage), with his unmistakable red hair and beer commercials with Sylvester Stallone, is the most popular boxer in Mexico. (There was even talk of a telenova.) He is a perfectionist, determined to build his legend via the path of most resistance. His promoter, Oscar de la Hoya, calls him the perfect product.

HBO's 24/7 profiled both boxers' early years and training for this fight.

Fans and experts have been happy to share their predictions with shaky-cam passers-by.
posted by clawsoon (32 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
It’s not too much of a stretch to say it might be the best middleweight clash since Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns engaged in their classic more than 30 years ago.

I rewatched that fight soonish after Mayweather McGregor and it's basically insane, it's like they actually want to kill each other.

British fight fans will be looking out for double olympic champ Nicola Adams on the undercard.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:17 AM on September 15, 2017 [6 favorites]


Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns engaged in their classic more than 30 years ago.


....During these (first round) exchanges Hearns broke his right hand.....

posted by lalochezia at 6:35 AM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


Lots and lots of liver shots. Well, as long as it lasts. Both fighters are seemingly always looking to end the show quick. Maybe the best chin wins this one. Or best liver...
posted by jim in austin at 7:13 AM on September 15, 2017


Neither fighter has ever been down, as far as I know. But then has either fighter been up against a puncher of this quality?
posted by clawsoon at 7:20 AM on September 15, 2017


I, too, was taken by the number of body-blow stoppages in both fighters' highlight reels.

"Styles make fights," as ever, and I like the combo of power vs precision, though both have a wide array of assets. Like all fighters with more than a couple dozen bouts, I saw lots of ways both could have lost, too, had they faced better opposition - GGG, especially, ate some inside-but-weak shots that, had they been delivered by a fighter of Hagler's quality, would've spoiled his perfect record. But getting insight with him is a huge risk, and those fighters all went down.

Can't figure out a way to dislike either of them, and I hope neither gets hurt.

Side note that every boxing thread should include a link to Hagler-Hearns for its distilled aggression, the unbelievable tension over just three rounds, and the contrast between their faces.
posted by Caxton1476 at 8:05 AM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


It seems like more fans think the odds favour GGG, while more boxers - especially boxers known for their skill - favour Canelo's chances. Everybody agrees that it'll be a great fight.
posted by clawsoon at 9:06 AM on September 15, 2017


Favorited for the thread title.
posted by ishmael at 9:08 AM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Nthing the Hagler-Hearns love. Holy crap, what an absolute brawl.
posted by Sphinx at 10:18 AM on September 15, 2017


Chatting with a co-worker today, I asked him what his weekend plans were. He said getting together to watch the fight. I replied with "boxing? Or mma?". He said boxing, and the convo ended there.

Now , I'm kicking myself for not checking Metafilter this morning!
posted by Fig at 10:20 AM on September 15, 2017




One of the crazy things about boxing is how they have the weigh-in the day before the fight, and then fighters re-gain 10 or 20 pounds by the time the fight starts. Canelo is notoriously good at this, with guesstimates as high as 25 pounds for some of his fights. In one of the HBO specials, he talked about how excruciating it is, and the lengths to which he goes - even shaving off hair to get an extra 50 grams. He has fought at the made-up weight class of 155 pounds - the "Catchnelo" class - a number of times, because getting down one more pound to the 154 light middleweight class has been just too much for his naturally much bigger body.
“I climb into the ring at whatever weight that’s going to give me the win, whether it’s 180 or 190 pounds-if I think it’s the appropriate (weight) for me on the day of the fight.”
That's bigger than light heavyweight. That's crazy.

Why don't they just weigh boxers right before the fight? That would surely lead to better matchups and less torture for the fighters.
posted by clawsoon at 6:22 AM on September 16, 2017


Why don't they just weigh boxers right before the fight?

Because the fighters would still cut weight and be much more likely to be dehydrated during the fight, which increases the chance of injury especially knock-outs and brain injury.

Plus is extents the promotional bru ha ha.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:35 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


Interesting point. But would they do that even knowing that it would make their fight chances worse? Don't they do all the weight manipulation to make their fight chances better?
posted by clawsoon at 6:59 AM on September 16, 2017


Most of the talk is about the fighters' power, but it'll be interesting to see how the jabs play out. Golovkin softens up his opponents with lots (I've read 2x-4x the middleweight average) of very stiff jabs. My Internet connection is wonky right now, or I'd look up one of the fight reels where they show all his jabs in a fight. (If anybody else can find one of those reels, it'd be worth posting to the thread.) It seems like he can bust up guys' faces just with his relentless jabbing.

Alvarez, on the other hand, is very good at moving his upper body to slip jabs, and he uses that as an opportunity to counterpunch. I wonder how much of the fight will be determined by jab-vs-slip.
posted by clawsoon at 9:07 AM on September 16, 2017


Here's a good one: Golovkin-Lemieux "...jab again... jab again..."
posted by clawsoon at 9:29 AM on September 16, 2017


Draw!
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 9:00 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


wow
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:01 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


that's crap
posted by 7segment at 9:03 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


What were the draw odds, 25:1? A small number of people are very happy tonight.

Does anybody know if Canelo's rematch clause included the possibility of a draw?
posted by clawsoon at 9:08 PM on September 16, 2017


The scoring system in boxing continues to baffle me.. How is 118-110 to Canelo even plausible?
posted by all the versus at 9:10 PM on September 16, 2017


Most disappointed person: Golovkin's wife, who wanted him to retire, instead of missing the birth of his daughter.
posted by clawsoon at 9:20 PM on September 16, 2017


One of the crazy things about boxing is how they have the weigh-in the day before the fight, and then fighters re-gain 10 or 20 pounds by the time the fight starts.

Cris Cyborg regained 30 pounds in three days after a weigh-in a couple of years ago.
posted by Etrigan at 9:26 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


Round 7 looks most interesting on the score cards. Every unofficial scorecard I've found online gave round 7 to Golovkin. Even the judge who scored it 118-110 for Alvarez gave round 7 to Golovkin. The only judge who didn't give round 7 to Alvarez was the one who made it a draw.
posted by clawsoon at 10:04 PM on September 16, 2017


Funny: People who were worried about the judging before the fight had their predictions exactly backwards. Moretti (115-113 GGG) was supposed to favour Canelo, while Byrd (118-110 Canelo) was supposed to favour GGG.
posted by clawsoon at 10:10 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


The ring "girls" have to stand there smiling for the whole post-fight press conference, too? That's a feat of athletic endurance all by itself, especially considering they got started before 3pm today for the preliminary undercards, when there was nobody in the arena except for them, the fighters, and somebody's mom.
posted by clawsoon at 11:43 PM on September 16, 2017


Glad I didn't bother stopping up then.

Even the Nicola Adams fight was cancelled due to problems with her opponents' blood test.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:02 AM on September 17, 2017


They promised big drama show. I guess Byrd provided it, given what everybody's talking about today. But thinking about the fight itself:

People were thinking back to Hagler-Hearns. The expectation was that two big punchers would spend the fight trading bombs, with either Canelo's skill or GGG's power winning out, and always the possibility for either fighter to land a knockout blow. Both fighters talked that way before the fight.

But, instead, it was like Hagler vs. Sugar Ray Leonard, right down to the more popular boxer playing and delaying the fight until the more dangerous boxer showed vulnerability. In the ring, Canelo followed the classic tactic of a smaller, faster, more skilled boxer against a big puncher: Move a lot, show off flashy flurries of punches periodically, now and then show that you can handle the other guy when you're against the ropes - but get out quick, don't stay on those ropes. Ride that bicycle. Canelo tried to do to GGG exactly what Mayweather did to him, and what Leonard did to Hagler.

Canelo followed his fight plan consistently, but there was one problem: Canelo wasn't the smaller man. He kept running out of gas. He was able to keep moving, so it wasn't fatal, but he couldn't put together enough sustained flurries enough times to win enough rounds the way that Mayweather and Leonard did. He fought a small man's fight as a big man, and it almost worked.

Almost.
posted by clawsoon at 7:19 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Great fight. Fair draw, despite the absurd 118-110. Sometimes there's no winner and that's OK. Canelo's defensive shifting was incredible and Golovkin's pressure was sublime. We don't need to slap an official binary result on top of those truths. Those facts can exist as they are, for us to appreciate.

I was surprised to see so little body work from GGG, but some folks on r/boxing pointed out that this would've opened him up to Canelo's elite counterpunching. Consider Jack Slack's thoughts from before the fight:
In a typical performance, Canelo leads with the body jab and the wide right to the body, and invites the opponent to throw back at him. He shows punches to draw punches and the speed, power and variety of his counter punches make him extremely dangerous. Hooking with both hands to the body and the head, uppercuts from both sides, pull counters, cross counters—Alvarez's bag of tricks against the orthodox boxer is a deep one.
GGG didn't want to take that chance, which rendered a large portion of his arsenal useless:
Golovkin, meanwhile is more akin to what most would think of when talking about a "Mexican style" fighter—something he and his camp have also said repeatedly. His focus is on placing the opponent on the ropes and working them over with up-down combinations. Golovkin's body work is some of the neatest you will see in the game. Typically there are two ways to change up the angles on blows: move to a different location in relation to the opponent, or arc the blows differently. Golovkin is good at standing directly in front of his opponent but bringing his fists in from all angles.
Golovkin was able to walk Canelo down with pressure, and had some success once Canelo was on the ropes, but his body work was almost totally out of the equation. After watching the highlight reels of his liver punch KOs, that was for me a bummer.
posted by daveliepmann at 9:13 AM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]


daveliepmann: After watching the highlight reels of his liver punch KOs, that was for me a bummer.

You can tell that Canelo and his camp watched those highlight reels, too - and didn't want to be the next highlight. :-)
posted by clawsoon at 9:32 AM on September 17, 2017




Has anyone seen the PPV numbers? I haven't had any luck finding them.
posted by clawsoon at 5:58 PM on September 19, 2017


I'm not the only one to think of Leonard-Hagler after watching Alvarez-Golovkin.
posted by clawsoon at 6:36 PM on September 23, 2017


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